Expert Interview: The Role of Detox in Creating Greater Oral (and Whole Being) Health
AUTHOR, NATUROPATH, CLINICAL NUTRITIONIST
Dr David Getoff
In his humorous and no nonsense style, Dr Getoff navigates through why detoxing is such a crucial and often misunderstood part of any wellness protocol.
Dr Getoff also addresses how to know when your detox is working as well as the very real dangers of detoxing too quickly.
Dr Getoff systematically explains why mercury and fluoride are dangerous to humans.
He also goes into substantial detail about how to begin the journey of detoxing mercury from the body, among other toxins in the system.
David also openly shares with listeners several products he regularly uses in his practice. Loaded with helpful information!
Watch
Downloads
Interview Transcript
Healthy Mouth World Summit
Dr David Getoff
The Role of Detoxification to Create Greater Oral and Whole Being Health
Will: The next expert to share with us here at the Healthy Mouth World Summit is Dr. David Getoff. Dr. Getoff is a nationally board certified clinical nutritionist, a board-certified traditional naturopath, and a certified nutritional consultant. He is an elected member of the both the American College of Nutrition and the International College of Integrative Medicine. Dr. Getoff is the vice president of the world-renowned nonprofit Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.
Despite maintaining a full-time health practice in San Diego, Dr. Getoff is a regular contributor and speaker all over the world for prestigious groups, including the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine, San Diego State University, the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, Freedom Law School, the Nutritional Therapy Association, Acres U.S.A., and the American College for the Advancement of Medicine. He’s also on the teaching faculty of the American College of Integrative Medicine and Dentistry.
From my perspective, Dr. Getoff’s unique contribution to science and medicine is his vast knowledge of research combined with decades of clinical experience and strict clinical observation. Dr. Getoff is going to be speaking today on the role of detoxification in creating greater health, how oral health undermines our health, and solutions we can all apply today to create optimal health.
Dr. David Getoff, welcome to the Healthy Mouth World Summit!
Dr. Getoff: Thank you very much! It’s a pleasure to be here!
Will: It’s such an honor to have you, a man of your level of experience here on the summit with us speaking on such a huge, important subject when it comes to oral health, but in general, systemic health, as well.
So, can you start off by just telling us why is detoxing important?
Dr. Getoff: Why is detoxing important? I’ve had a lot of people ask me that question. And I always find it a fascinating question because if you were to ask somebody or somebody were to ask you, “Why is it important that preferably every time you go to the bathroom, you flush, and you don’t just let it accumulate in the toilet?” Or, “Why is it that — geez, it’s a pain in the neck — we have to clean the house at least once every couple months?” Or, “How come we have to empty or put in a new vacuum cleaner bag?” Everybody would say, “Well, that’s a stupid question. Why did anybody ask that question?”
But what if our body, and, therefore, hopefully to most of the listeners, a helluva lot more important than the examples I just gave because it’s not going to hurt your toilet. It’s not going to hurt your vacuum cleaner. It’ won’t pull as well. You’ll start having smells in the house. But, the porcelain is not going to care in the toilet. And the plastic and the metal aren’t going to care on the vacuum cleaner. And, of course, your surfaces in the house aren’t going to revolt because there’s too much dust and crud on them.
But, your body will revolt. Your body will stop working correctly. So, why is it important? Because the vast majority of substances which are not good for us, and which accumulate in our body because we can’t help it there around us all the time and they come in through our skin, they come in through our mouth, they come in through our sinuses and our nose, and of course, they are byproducts, to some extent, of the food we’re eating if they’re not already on the food we’re eating.
All of these things accumulate and have varying degrees of toxic effects, which are the reasons, in many cases, coupled with bad quality food choices and insufficient nutrients, that we get almost every single condition that we’d like to not get!
Will: [Laughs]
Dr. Getoff: [Laughs] How’s that for an answer that you didn’t expect?!
Will: That’s great! That’s perfect! So, what percentage of the public would you guess would benefit from increasing their body’s ability to detox?
Dr. Getoff: Probably only those that don’t live in the middle of a pristine rain forest and have no stress level and just enjoy what they do all the time, get perfect food. All their meats are raw. All their fats are raw. All their vegetables are raw. And there really isn’t any stress to accumulate. And because they haven’t accumulated any other types of toxicity, their kidneys and their liver are working as well as when they were born and can get rid of those few things the body produces itself.
Will: I see, so… [laughs]. So, not many of us need to, I take it…
Dr. Getoff: Not many of us do not get benefitted by doing detoxification. Correct. Will: Yeah, so, literally, in this modern day and age, all joking aside, it’s all of us. Dr. Getoff: It’s all of us!
Will: We all need to have a detox protocol.
Dr. Getoff: I completely agree. I take at least one detoxification type of substance daily, often twice a day, sometimes three times a day. A patient will come in here and I’ll be checking whether they need a specific thing, and I’ll grab my Zeolite spray off my desk and throw seven sprays in my mouth. And they go, “What’s that?” And I go, “We’ll be talking about that later. But basically that’s going to be grabbing on to different heavy metals and a couple other chemicals, binding them, and pulling them out so when I go to the bathroom, some of that stuff comes out that would have otherwise accumulated in my body where I don’t want it because I would like to avoid as many conditions as possible and stay happy, healthy, and keep my memory until I die at as much over a hundred as I can manage.”
Will: Well put. So, what is the result of a system that’s overburdened with toxins?
Dr. Getoff: Well, just like the toilet and the vacuum cleaner, it simply doesn’t do it’s job as well. That’s the first part. So that’s very simple. Everybody can understand it doesn’t do it’s job as well. The question is, “What does that mean?” Well, how many different things do you know — and there are a bunch that people are not thinking about — that you would not want to be done not as well? Would you like your elimination to not be done as well because you get horrendously constipated because the musculature and neurological system has been too poisoned for it to work as well? Would you like your voice not to be as good? Would you like your memory not to be as good? How about your immune system? Would you like that not to work as well? Would you like to be one of the people that says, “Anytime anybody around me is sick, I always catch it”?
Or would you like to be somebody like me that says, “I don’t care how many people come into my office and have the flu, the chances of my getting it from them is very, very, very low because it’s doing the job it’s supposed to,” it, again, being my immune system.
So, every single system in the body is affected by toxic substances, by poisons, by chemicals, whatever. The word toxins is sort of interesting. I believe that if you look it up, toxins refers to substances produced by the body endogenously that are not good for us. So, I often don’t use the word toxin because if I’ve got a PhD research scientist, they will immediately think I mean something the body made. And I’ll instead say, “toxic substances” or “poisons” or whatever. As far as we’re concerned today, I’m just going to lump them all together. No matter which word I use, we’re talking about a substance your body would be happier with less of.
Will: Right. And that actually brings up an interesting point. Maybe we’ll get into it later on is the difference between a toxin…In other words, there are things that our bodies produce that, as they build up, those are toxic to us, as well, obviously. We’re not just talking about environmental pollutants here.
Dr. Getoff: Oh, absolutely! No, we’re talking about things that the body makes when we break down foods, especially, of course, when we’re ingesting foods that the body doesn’t even like to begin with — lousy quality, improperly raised.
But, just the normal metabolic process includes the production of substances that are not supposed to be in our body. If the normal metabolic process did not do that, if everything remained in the body and we just generated maybe carbon dioxide like chlorophyll plants do, we wouldn’t need a urinary system or a fecal or stool system because we wouldn’t have to let anything out. We would use what we used. And anything else would transpire out into, maybe, carbon dioxide in the air like a plant.
So, yes, we produce a lot of things that the body wants to get rid of that are no longer what they were originally and which have to go away if we don’t want to overload the systems.
Will: Right, right. So, we’re really dealing with a very, very broad subject here. We’re not talking about heart disease. We’re not talking about cancer. We’re not talking about cirrhosis. We’re talking about it all, really, is what it sounds like.
Dr. Getoff: Right. Exactly. In other words, if somebody says, “I want my house to withstand the elements” because they just want to know that it’s going to last for a long time, they’re not saying that the glass has to be able to withstand a little bit of hail or that the roof and roofing tiles or shingles have to be able to withstand some rain. They’re saying whatever happens — the sun, the hail, a typhoon, unbelievable winds, just the degradation from the sun on your paint or your stucco — whatever it is that’s attacking that particular structure…And, of course, attacking isn’t the right word because wind and rain and snow and sleet and hail and sun don’t attack your house. They simply exist, and your house gets degraded by it.
So, yeah. Every single thing which is something which the body would be better off if we could eliminate and every single condition — I guess condition is one of our overwhelming terms because there’s nothing it really leaves out — every single condition that you would prefer, let’s say, not to get, can be addressed by making our toxic load — or, as the Environmental Working Group in their original study decades ago like to call it, so I like that term, I think they may even have coined it — our “body burden,” we like to be as low as possible when it comes to dangerous substances.
Will: Body burden. I’m writing that down. I like that one.
Dr. Getoff: Yeah, if you go to EWG.org, Environmental Working Group, in their search engine put in “body burden,” you will get their different studies, the ones done years and years and years ago, a couple decades ago, maybe, even, where they examined, I think it was about 12 different people, including a couple of fanatic organic people that had people cooking for them all the way down to some people that owned newspapers or whatever. And you can actually click on the person’s face if you get to the right place in there. And it shows you the 45 to 75 or more different toxins they found in this person’s body. And it’s scary.
And then they have the newer one where they did this on the cord blood on newborns showing that we have somebody that’s just being born. They haven’t had a breath yet! And how many of the couple hundred toxic substances they were studying were already in this child! So, yeah, there’s a lot of stuff!
Will: Right. So, can you talk us through the role that detoxification plays through the various organ systems of the body? And I know it’s a really broad question. But, what I’m looking to do is to take this concept of detoxification, and let’s bring it down. First of all, I love the fact that you’re coming from the very whole-body, whole-being perspective and not saying it’s a one-organ system issue. It is a blanket. It’s an umbrella situation that you’re talking about here.
Dr. Getoff: Oh, it is absolutely an umbrella situation. There’s no question about it. And different people test — we can probably talk about that later — test for toxic substances in the body in different ways and don’t even realize how poor their testing is.
But, as far as detox, the skin is often referred to as the largest detoxification organ of the body. And I guess that could easily be. I’m not sure if you were to be able to record or study the amount of miles of glomeruli in the kidneys, how many miles that it. Certainly, the skin is one detox organ. The kidneys. I have some patients that only have one because one had to be removed. So then it would would be the kidney is a detox organ.
The liver is a phenomenal detox organ. Our breath, breathing. It’s not a detox organ, that would be the lungs. But, being able to breathe substances out that we’re better off getting rid of, even if it happens to be the extra CO2 that we’d like to get rid of. These are all different ways that we detox. And, of course, we have the urine and the stool and the hair, which are three different things which the body exudes which have various different toxic substances in them. You can find lead and mercury and cadmium and all sorts of different things in any of those, including the hair. And these are ways that the body uses to get rid of things. It pushes them out into the hair. They feed the hair follicles and get into the hair, which is then dead. It comes out. It comes out in our urine, comes out in our stool. So, all of these together combined make up the entire set of methods that the body utilizes to get rid of toxic substances that it would like to try and get rid of when it is doing well enough to be able to get rid of them instead of sort of giving up and saying, “I can’t get this stuff out. It’s just going to sit here.”
Will: So, the body can reach a place of degradation, if you will, where it just kind of throws up its hands and it doesn’t even have the energy to attempt its normal detoxification processes, huh?
Dr. Getoff: It can absolutely do that. That seems to be at least — we’re always finding out new things — but that seems to be dependent on at least two different things. One is exactly as we just discussed. It reaches the point where different systems are not working well enough — kidneys, the liver — are simply so much below optimal that they can’t do anywhere near as much as they’re supposed to do.
The second is genetic. And, of course, genetic is a funny term because we have epigenetics where we can change or genetics. But, nonetheless, there are genetic tests that can be done. Hal Huggins’ new DNA lab is doing some of them where, just looking at which specific genes are turned on and turned off, you can test, let’s say, a dozen people and find out, well, with this particular person, their genetic structure is set up in such a way that they are very poorly able to eliminate mercury. And this other person’s genetic structure is set up so that they are much better able to eliminate mercury.
So, now, you do a test on those two people: urine, stool, maybe hair, maybe all three if you’re really good and you want to take a close look. And you find that the person whose genetics are poor for the elimination of mercury, that there’s almost no mercury coming out of them, and you test somebody whose genetics are good, you find a lot of mercury is coming out of them.
And the health practitioner who doesn’t understand detoxification — which is only about 98% of them, so it’s not too many — takes a look at the person that’s getting a whole bunch of mercury coming out the in his or her urine or stool, and says, “Wow, this person is loaded with mercury,” which, in this case, is false. They’re the one getting rid of most of it. And they take a look at the other person where almost nothing is coming out because of their genetics, and they go, “Oh, this person is fine,” where, in fact, that person is in much worse shape. They’re loaded up with it, and you can’t see it.
Will: Right. It’s just not being excreted from the body. So, what connection do you see between a system whose, for example, detox pathways are not functioning well? I’m not talking about somebody who is really shutting down, but just, most of us out there who are doing our best. But we could definitely use improvement.
The second idea is impaired thyroid, oral issues, and degenerative disease. So, if I put those four terms together in a box for you, what would you have to say?
Dr. Getoff: Well, thyroid, immune function. Let’s start with the thyroid, since you mentioned it first. The thyroid gland is obviously a very important gland. I always find it interesting when somebody says a particular gland is an important gland. How many glands do we have that are not important?
They used to think the appendix wasn’t important. It was just an appendage. That’s probably one of the reasons they named it that way, and it didn’t make any difference. And then a bunch of years ago they found that it’s the repository for beneficial bacteria and helps hold them to slowly disseminate them.
People obviously think the gall bladder is not important because those get removed all the time. And now you can’t properly produce enough bile, and, therefore, you can’t digest your fats correctly. And on a low-fat diet, you’re asking for neurological problems.
So, they’re all important. But, the thyroid gland is a little bit more well-known by people. Everybody goes, “Oh, my thyroid gland is under active. I’m going to be tired.” Eh, not necessarily.
But what will hurt it? Who knows how many different things will hurt it? The ones that have been studied well enough that we know them for a fact include mercury and fluoride. There’s no question about those two. And others, very often the money doesn’t go into proving something is destroying a certain organ. But if you have something that’s a toxic substance that our tissues don’t like, very likely it’s going to hurt almost every single organ in various ways, including pesticides and herbicides.
And, so, we have all these people where if the poisons are specific types of poisons — and nobody’s really done this research — to be able to say, well this poison does this, and that poison does that. There’s a little of it, but not much. But, I’m sure with some poisons, we end up, as we poison this particular person’s thyroid, not on purpose, they’re just drinking fluoridated water or they’ve got the one or more silver fillings in their body and their mouth that are 52% mercury, leeching 24 hours a day. And the thyroid stops working as well.
Now, what does that mean? Well, for one person, it means their thyroid has gone overactive. It’s not doing its job correctly. It doesn’t know what’s going on and it’s overactive. They’re hyperthyroid.
In another person, it’s destroyed the function in a way which makes it not do enough of what it’s supposed to be doing. It is hypothyroid. And in a third or fourth person, it has, instead, caused what we call an autoimmune disease where the body is attacking itself. And we’re not really sure that that’s a good term. Very often, the body is trying to get toxins out of its own tissues. And that’s what it’s doing. It’s not really attacking itself in the way that’s being described.
But, then we have Hashimoto’s, Graves. And, so, the question is can we prove that those toxins are doing this? For me, the proof is that I have patients that, after enough years — and that’s how long it takes — of continual detoxification of substances, I’ve got people whose thyroids normalized, which is theoretically impossible. They’ve been on thyroid drugs for five years, ten years, when I saw them for the first time.
And then I get a phone call maybe three years later when they aren’t even in my state anymore. They’re still taking the nutrients. They’re still taking the detox. I ship them stuff or they pick it up elsewhere. And they go, “You know, the funniest thing happened. I was really feeling horrible all of a sudden. And I went into the doctor, and the doctor said, “Gee, that sounds like a hyperthyroid condition. And you have hypothyroid.” And they ran a test and what happened is we finally got enough poisons out. Their thyroid was working!
And the thyroid drugs that they were on to help supplant the fact that it wasn’t otherwise doing its job were no longer doing its job were no longer needed. But the were still being taken. And so now we had far too much going in. And the drugs made the individual hyperthyroid. And they’ve said, “I’ve never seen this today, but stop taking your drugs.” And as soon as they stopped, and it was the thyroid producing the hormones, everything was fine. And I get a phone call telling me all this and thanking me.
So we can do all sorts of things to help the body with the thyroid, with the immune system, whichever area you want — the kidneys, the liver. I’ve gotten people off of liver and kidney transplant lists.
How many could I do that with? I have no idea. But I have done it. So, there’s a lot of stuff we can do if we start pulling out all of the different substances that are directly, indirectly, or part of the cause of a problem that most people don’t even realize that they have anything to do with that problem.
Will: Wow! That’s gotta be a fun phone call, when you get that from a person saying, “Hey! Guess what?!”
To read the rest of the transcript, Download the PDF file.
Take your oral hygiene routine to the next level
“I am extremely happy with my purchase! I was trying many different toothpastes before hearing of this company and am very happy I decided to give it a go! It took a bit to get used to however my teeth are feeling incredible! I highly recommend to everyone!” - Tracy W.